Welcome to frozen Hell
by Sevoris
Summary: 13th January 2066. With the collapse of the Wichita Salient imminent, and Project Zero Dawn only just approaching a stable launch, 10 people have no other choise but to finish their lifes greatest work and earths only hope for a future inside GAIA Prime, sealing themselves away. These are the final hours of Project Zero Dawn...
1. Chapter 1

**Part 1**

 _Penultimate station - Terminus_

They say that the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

For them, it has been all the way.

They say that souls cry out in terror as the abyss swallows them hole.

But the Alphas do not make a sound.

And their eleventh member, the result of frenzied 14 months of work, their last 14 months, is in no position to say anything right now, already secured at GAIA Prime inside the server room, silenced by the enforced com blackout. No sense painting themselves as obvious targets.

Ten humans. One AIs: The pilot for the military Vert, silent except regular status announcement about arrival times.

They all know that this is it. A moment of respite, to think.

Even Travis Tate, eternal loudmouth and speaker of inappropriate things at inappropriate times, is silent, his facial expression hidden behind the mask of his M2 combat suit. No sense in taking the masks off. The Vert is climate-controlled and pressurized, with its own set of recycler and environmental systems, but this way disembarkation and embarkation just proceed that much quicker.

And they can have their privacy for a time. So by silent agreement, the helmets stay on.

Elizabeth Sobeck looks out of the entoptic window of the Vert, towards the engines at the ends of the wings, how they minutely move in response to the outside air, and vibrate in tune with the motions of the airframe. Their exhaust is a just-visible scything blue.

Atmospheric plasma engines were cutting-edge tech before the swarm. Before… everything. Now they're a necessity. No oxygen in the air to burn anymore; regular combustion systems of any kind do not work anymore. So an expensive flywheel system and superconductive solenoids store enough power for this one last flight… the flight to GAIA Prime.

"So this is what is left", Charles Ronson remarks into the silence, staring down onto brown trees and the sickly orange-brown underbrush of suffocated, rotting fauna.

Even the decomposers have problems now; choking away without oxygen, they fail to catalyze a proper breakdown of the dead biomatter.

"And even that will go the way of the Dodo in four days", Tate remarks. "Enjoy our wayward parade guard while it lasts. But hey, you think the swarm will appreciate-"

"Travis…", Margo Shĕn cuts him off, at the same time laying an armored hand on Ronson's shoulder pauldron. The man looks about ready to snap out of his restraints.

"What? C'mon guys, it is the end of the world! 5 days to Zero Day, 18th of January 2066! One last big feast and then…", he raised his arms like a composer, "silence."

A few of the others make the effort to shake their heads, but the rest is too deep in thoughts. Crunching code in their heads, massive archives of cryogenically stored zygotes, seeds, and digitalized DNA, the intricate workings of facilities and machines that now lie underground, buried around the world. All sealed up, in low-power mode, synched through the fibre-optic network they somehow managed to lay down and make work in the early phases of the project.

But right now, in data quarantine, there's few ways to effectively work. Their work is going to finish at GAIA Prime… and their lives too.

Ronson especially has not been the same over the past hours. The man is clearly grief-stricken, that much everyone can tell. Elizabeth especially. Ronson always had a certain… liveliness about him. A concentration that bordered on the maniacal, a fanaticism of biological preservation.

Right then and there she decides she will talk with him. God in heaven and souls in hell know they will have the time.

Her own task queue has years of work ahead of her. So does Shĕn's. Tate will have his own piece of work ahead of him, and he knows. HADES is still incomplete; a rollback might sound easy, but "you can't create a human centipede without some good surgery", as Tate has put it in one more of his inappropriate moments. And especially inside HADES, nobody will be there to debug. Shĕn made some massive progress teaching HEPHAESTUS and through it, GAIA, coding and self-driven bug removal, but when GAIA is not in control, so are her damage-control skills removed.

And GAIA herself. Before today, the entire system was never integrated, never tested in full load and network sync. The next days decide whether their legacy lives… or dies, and all of earthen life with it.

No pressure.

* * *

[ZD_MF_DTP:2066.01. .3445.2355]

"Doctor Sobeck, you have a SecureCom call from General Herres, Priority Alpha-Plus", the voice of her personal assistance chimes inside her ears.

Her fingers stop on the keyboard, ZD# code implementation halted mid-method. Her eyes instinctively flitter to GAIA for a moment, physical QB-lattice craddle in front of Sobeck, her holographic avatar to the left, surrounded by the mesh of connections that indicates participation in simulations. Then she looks back at the code. The module is old, part of the Mk.1 series. Until now, there has never been a reason to re-implement it, but recent changes on HEPHAESTUS demand a change in interfaces. New ports, new protocols.

BETA-testing a fully intelligent, permutating AI system with the most lines of total code ever written in human history has proven to be an entire nightmare in itself. Not helped by the way the Alphas and their teams keep rolling back codelines, writing new models, re-iterating now that the meta bahavior of Zero Dawn crystallizes.

And the time they have left to work… dwindles steadily.

The "Doomsday clocks" were there since Day 1. Life-updated with the latest sims and predictive models, the decisions by the Commanders of USRC and others. Up top, the clock until Zero Dawn goes terminal status and evacuates remaining personal to associated facilities.

Underneath that, close behind, Zero Day.

The time until re-population of the Earth was added by Day fourteen, when they Finlay felt confident in the timeline.

315 years, 10 days, 14 hours until human civilization restarts.

Hopefully.

"Doctor Sobeck." The hologram of General Herres is only really animated shoulders-up, she notices at once. That means he is still in his command seat. Not good.

"General Herres. How bad?" No point dancing around the point. They can hear the weapons fire at this point, the rumbling bass of the artillery railguns and the launch of the missiles.

"We just got the latest Keyshorts. We know where those Scarabs went; they regrouped and amassed with heavy elements in support, and giving their Titans time to catch up and replicate. The swarm is just about to launch a pincer attack on the eastern front. We've run the sims. 10^4, and they all say the same. The Salient will collapse within 48 hours at most. After that, 48 more hours, and USRC will be overrun. Another 24 hours until the swarm… rolls back the entire Zero Dawn Secure Zone." No fancy holographs; just words, and a stern face.

"As of this time, Zero Dawn is in the terminal phase. Pack up doctor, prepare to move. Contingency RUNNING START is in effect imminently. You have 24 hours to pack up. By 48 I want everyone where they are supposed to be."

Her mind imminently snaps into action, assesses consequences and necessary actions. The Ifs are right at the front. If, if, if. If she had not proposed Lightkeeper… If they had had more time to iron out the last kinks in the code… if only they would have to rewrite basic protocols at this point in time…

No matter. Focus. Decisive action. Squander no second.#

"Understood general. We're initiating RUNNING START imminently. Good luck on the front."

"And to you as well." They are about to sign off, then Herres comes back into focus, turns his eyes to her: "Is she ready?"

"Just about Sir. We could have had more time for the fixes, and we're gonna shortcut very likely, but… she's about as ready as we want her. The rest… we will make work."

Herres nods, and smiles: "You always have, Doctor. Don't let us down now. Everyone is counting on this."

 _Oh, why do you remind me?_ "I know Sir. Talk to you, excuse me now."

His hologram winks away, and the last embers of the kindling snap die out. The stress is getting to her. But no point in loudly arguing, or getting angry. They did not need it in the past, and they do not need it now.

"GAIA…"

"Yes, Doctor Sobeck?"

"Begin preparations for transfer. I'm gonna finish the protocol patch, then upload to you in… half an hour."

"Understood Doctor Sobeck."

"Alright. Focus, get me-"

GAIA comes back: "Doctor Sobeck… should I alert the Alphas?"

"Only the ones who ask why you terminate the Sims. They'll know in due time." The AI goes back to work without another word.

"Focus, get me Dalen in Logistics." She sits down at the terminal and quickly finishes the one line, adding the rest of the method and the variables. There, almost done. Implement the last few classes and their private methods, and the interface is finished. Text in the framework in 20, pull the last few bugs, then compile and upload into the patcher. Pint 30 minutes, they can pull the plug.

The connection dials for three seconds before Dalens answers: "Doctor Sobeck, what contingency?"

 _This is probably going to repeat itself a lot. Everyone expects some case or another to happen any hour._

"RUNNING START. Prepare the cargo vert, and alert GAIA Prime. GAIA moves in two hours. Get the robot up here in half an hour and prepare for packaging and loading."

"Yes Ma'am. We're on it. Should I kick the rest into gear…"

"Alert Williams if you could, yes. Excuse me." She cuts the connection.

Inside her dashboard, she calls up the Directorial Apps: Specifically the Public Announcement System. The facility-wide directorial channel is right at the top, and her hand reaches for the grey slider that opens it. Sobeck takes a deep breath. She's done this before, but… not like this.

She opens the channel, waits for the chime and the initial sound que of the PA to run. Then the channel is hers.

"Attention all Zero Dawn Personal. Due to the approaching collapse of the Saliant, we are initiating RUNNING START, effective imminently. All teams, you have four hours at most before evacuation of all Gammas for Elysium begins; stabilize code and lock down your systems during that time. We don't need finals, we need stable Beta software. Support teams, prepare for the egress to Elysium, transfer of final components to GAIA Prime, and the lockdown of the Zero Dawn facility.

"This is it everyone. Let's finish our work and launch. Do not falter now, so close to our goal. Alphas, we will have a meeting in 40 minutes. See to your teams in the meantime."

With another motion and chime, she closes the PA.

The first calls come in not 3 seconds later.

Kareha from Medical is the first on the line: "Doctor Sobeck, I suppose that means…"

"Yes, Kareha. You… you should get ready for… dispensation." She can't get herself to speak about this straight. In some way she's dreaded it… all of this. But then, what is there to be done now?

Zero Dawn was always been their own final goal in life. Now… now there's only the terminus. 1 day, 10 days, 100 years… but none of them are going to survive.

This humanity is one way or another, done for. 99% of it are already dead; the rest… well, 100 years. At that point, simple lack of resources will kill those who somehow survived until then. And outside… I the swarm doesn't figure out what you are inside your suit, a M2 only has resources for two weeks at most. After that point… Terminus.

"Understood Doctor Sobeck. We'll be ready."

She plops down at the workstation in front of GAIA, holographs stringing out the intricacies of her baseline coding and architecture. 46 billion lines of code here alone, strung together from decades of AI experience, programming by other AI systems, Sobeck's work, and that of her team. The base is actually Teds work, well, in a way… he never touched code himself. A FAS AI hosting OS. Quite comprehensive, experience from dozens of AIs around the world strung into it, millions of classes and methods.

The end result of over 201,000 man hours in 14 months.

And still not complete.

Elisabet feels the need to cry rise up in her throat, sitting there like a stone. She closes her eyes and clenches her hands into fists, resisting the urge to bath the tabletop.

She takes the next call. It's security: "Ma'am, do you want us to inform the… retained candidates?"

"…Yes. They know that this was coming anyway. Make them the offers, then… proceed. And please, keep an eye on everything, the breakdown-"

"-will happen sooner or later. We're aware, Ma'am. And Ma'am, in case we do not have the time to speak anymore… it was a pleasure working under you. Finish Zero Dawn. Give life, give humanity a future after the end."

"…I… I will, Captain. Good luck."

Two calls in and already she feels like throwing up.

* * *

Shĕn is looking on the testing range of HEPHAESTUS when the call comes in. "Ma'am, this is Simulations?"

She looks up from two 3D printer arms working on a blue-blackish metamaterial panel, laser etching refining the printed surface structures as extruders lay down layer after layer of the phased array transmission system.

A last-minute test for the transmission tower material, implementing new refinements from MINERVAs transmission element group and ensuring they fabricate properly.

The remaining fab time is still… 3 hours. _And we need at least two hours for the material tests_ _…_

"Focus, show me evacuation list for material test group, projected from now under RUNNING START."

The list printed out in seconds. _Shit. Half my test team will be gone in six hours if-_

"Attention all Zero Dawn Personal. Due to the approaching collapse of the Saliant, we are initiating RUNNING START, effective imminently. All teams, you have four hours at most before evacuation of all Gammas for Elysium begins; stabilize code and lock down your systems during that time. We don't need finals, we need stable Beta software. Support teams, prepare for the egress to Elysium, transfer of final components to GAIA Prime, and the lockdown of the Zero Dawn facility.

"This is it everyone. Let's finish our work and launch. Do not falter now, so close to our goal. Alphas, we will have a meeting in 40 minutes. See to your teams in the meantime."

"-They'll be gone in six hours. _Right_."

Then the thought of the moment really hits her.

This is it. The point of no return, and-

-So much is not ready yet. So much code yet in Beta, or even Alpha base, so many interfaces still buggy or not tested in full interaction…

The fact are well-known, their consequence… obvious. They have to finish Zero Dawn. Launch GAIA with all her sub-functions fully intact, and able to do what no human will be able of doing.

And HEPHAESTUS… is the core, the master key to it all.

The facilities are all sealed already. Bunkerage filled up with bootstrapping material, fabricators, forges, future steel mills and rock crushers and washers and separators and chemical synthesizer and chip etchers and nanoassembler units and reactors… all primed and ready for that first moment 60 years from now, when MINERVA has finished her work and HEPHAESTUS will race to errect "The Spires" - The advanced transmission arrays that will shut down the Faro swarm for good.

60 years. It feels almost… painfully close. Shĕn is young enough to maybe witness that event, that fatefully moment when the Faro Plaque finally dies. She has the genes for it; and inside the controlled environment of GAIA Prime, with a state-of-the-art medica facility stocked with everything in the human power to repair the human body, originaly fitted for the Lightbringer protocol, and an AI to watch her back… The thought is overwhelming. Strange, even. How is she going to feel after 60 years, well into her 90s? Will she even hold out that long, as her colleagues die around her?

For her, for everyone at Zero Dawn, the project has been everything. A last fleeting moment of purpose in the face of oblivion and annihilation. But now, with Zero Dawn shutting down and everyone evacuating to Elysium… and GAIA Prime… half of her team will have peacefully died in the last sleep of Euthanasia in 48 hours. Held only by the thin thread of Zero Dawn, the Damocles sword plunges, and takes its people into oblivion… and into peace.

Shĕn has no illusions about her own end - She's not going to Elysium. She's not gonna be standing in a row in medical, waiting for her turn, holding the hands of people. Her family… ma and Shu… they're gonna be safe. They'll have their space in Elysium, they already have. Most likely they're just getting the call by Admin. The hab's sealing up the same time GAIA Prime, ARTEMIS-1, and DEMETER-1, the last facilities remaining inside the perimeter. Surface access hidden away, sealed tight to mask every electronic signature, the surface complex… demolished. Stripped bare, the swarm will think nothing of it. It's stupid like that, thankfully.

Safe… for a time.

She snaps back to the present with a buz of her Focus. A small App she's used since her adolescence, to keep herself from drifting.

"Right." She raises her voice. "Alright, you know the gameplan. Testing, pull the fabs inside 3 hours, feed them into testing. Get them tested rigorously. Note down everything, especially the Gammas as you'll be evacuated first.

"Uuuh… we're gonna be racing the clock there on the active components," someone shouted, hidden away behind the bulk of a standard industrial control console matted to a less-standard ZD fabrication chamber.

"Then push it."

"That's gonna skew…"

"-What exactly do we have predictive AI-supervised modelers for if we do not use them? C'mon people this is not the first time we cut short, use that knowledge of yours! Pull and test, and do it inside the timeframe. I'd like to push our _final_ HEPHAESTUS Beta iteration while we still have the team together to do just that!"

"We'll be on it, boss."

"Software…"

"We'll get to it. Gonna call Sobeck in a bit, get the final bits on that interface issue filed out with th other teams, then we implement and test that."

"Don't forget, they'll move GAIA. So use the Simulators and Test iterations."

"Ooooh. Yeah, will do."

She re-keys her Focus, letting her PA guide her selections. Someday they wrote protocols for this day, and the AIs have kept an eye on it, modifying them, adapting them. Charles from Fabrication Coding is on the line: "Ma'am, what about the Resource Allocation Beta?"

"Stabilize it. Work the code for another two hours, then freeze the neural networks and package it up. We don't need perfect now, we need working first of all. The rest… will be seen to."

"Shĕn, will you…"

"Charles, you know the numbers and options as well as I do. We'll finish GAIA. One way or another."

"…We'll be on it, Shĕn." Charles voice is suddenly sombre, and she can hear how he is edging towards tears.

"Charles, given the impeding hectic… it was a pleasure working with you."

Now the voice is tear-stricken: "With you as well, Ma'am." Then it steels for a final word: "Let's finish this."

* * *

 **A/N:** Welcome To Frozen Hell started off as an experimental writing project, a way to clear my headspace from the work on different projects (including the story Ghost in the Shell: Ascendance, which I co-write with NickBana.) Then it turned into a one-shot shared among friends and fans of the series.

At this point, I think Frozen Hell can be shared on a wider basis. The world of the Old Ones, and Project Zero Dawn and its people, always has had a peculiar fascination for me. Welcome To Frozen Hell is an experiment, one among several I write on but the first go be published, to try to get into the heads of these people. What drove them? What defined them? What did Zero Dawn lock like in detail, especially during these final days?

I don't think I will get all the answers. Certainly not the canonical ones. We can only extrapolate. But I hope Welcome To Frozen Hell is a decent shot at doing just that.

As this is a side project, Welcome To Frozen Hell will update intermediately, and always in larger update bundles.

Feedback and constructive criticism about everything is always welcome! And feel free to discuss what you think about the story, and the people of Zero Dawn!


	2. Chapter 2

**Part 2**

 _Time for packing travel bags not included_

"GAIA Prime, terminal approach. 5 minutes to landing."

The Autopilots announcement rips them out of monetary thoughts. Travis Tate seems to want to say something for just one more moment; then he sinks back into his seat, helmet bumping against the headrest, lenses burning holes into the ceiling of the Vert.

"Have to admit… I did not see it end like this," Naoto admits. "This is not a poetic end. Noble maybe, but it doesn't… feel right."

"And yet, so right all the same", Ebadji concludes. "GAIA is our life's work… literally. Even though we did not know it, our career paths steered us towards this day, gave us the tools and the wisdom to realize this project, unparalleled in scope and brilliance. We were never not going to finish what we started."

"Not that it is much of a choice… with the Odyssey gone, GAIA is the only thing between a deep breath… and a dying wisper," Shĕn remarks solemnly.

"Especially now. The Salient is under attack as we speak, the remaining pockets are not much better…"

"Or worse", Tate joins in, "much worse. Like, overrun and turned into Biofuel worse." Under his breath he mutters: "Wonder how many of them used nukes."

"-And that. Half of our team has already gone to sleep… many more will follow… and Elysium, well…"

"They are going to seal up the same time as us," Sobeck says. "Official lockdown time is in roundabout… 30 more hours."

"1 day after the predicted Wichita collapse…"

"1 more till Robot Command falls."

"…You know, you ever think the swarm will figure out what we did here? Like, is it clever enough for that?"

"Not really", Kimiko Hasegawa, Alpha of MINERVA, contributes. "The swarm is a supreme strategist and hacker after a fashion, but its AI is limited-purview; it was never designed, and has shown no tendencies to evolve pattern-matching capabilities of sufficient granulate and datapoint range to figure out anything related to Zero Dawn. We had no singular breach of any Zero Dawn facility to date."

"Let's hope that record stays that way for the next 60 years, because if it figures out anything…"

"Zero Dawn would possibly be more or less screwed," Tate concludes. "A rather… anticlimactic climax for our big girl."

"Your puns are still terrible, Travis."

"Why thank you Margo!" He mockingly bows his head inside the cage.

Outside, the whine of the engines changes as the Vert begins to slow down and descend, throttling down and slightly extending aerofoil sections of its wing and fuselage to increase its wind resistance. On the status display hovering over the entryway into the one-person manual cockpit, the speed and altitude numbers start dropping.

Below, the dying forests thin out alongside the air, replaced by naked shrubbery of the same sickly brown, grey, yellow and red of the now-polluted earth. Ahead, rock-barren grey mountains stab into dirty, cloud-covered heavens, without the mantle of snow slowly rebuilt during the claw-back. The air is too hot, with not enough rainfalls, plagued by a new hothouse effect that only gets worse by the day as even more CO2 escapes into the atmosphere. Proto-Venus, and just as eerily-hostile in its beauty, much more hurting in memories of days past, when this land was green and thriving, not dead and slowly decomposing, chocked with not enough oxygen, poisoned by the release of sulfuric compounds and worse.

Signs of civilization are still around. The roads and mono-tracks of the restoration projects, tourist paths and newly blazed construction road to GAIA Prime, now devoid off traffic, the huts of robot hotels and the tourist lodges, now devoid and without life. Whoever lived here has been evacuated to the remaining shelters, or conscripted to fight at the remaining front. Power was pulled shortly thereafter. No reason to supply a net with power that has largely been compromised by the swarm and used as an energy source, no need for obvious EM signatures or the effort of running the network and its maintenance bots. The military runs on fission and fusion power anyway, charging the 'caps and fueling the cells, or directly via landline. Not that solar or beamed power works well these days, considering the weather.

Ahead, a misty halo of LED-white manifests from the mist, cutting itself into details by the second; towering skeletal frameworks sprouting powerful LED panels, illuminating the surface perimeter of GAIA Prime; the triplite perimeter fence and earth damn, the non-lethal sentries and patrol drones still ever-vigilantly enforcing the perimeter of the construction. Only the outer perimeter fence lies defunct now, erected during the earliest days of the project when tourists, paparazzi and conspiracy theorists were more common and watching the "newest Faro monstrosity."

The Vert field is full; three of them are heavy, four-pod cargo transports, ramps down and deserted; the rest are passenger transports. The parking lot still filled with heavy-duty military six-wheelers whose blueprint comes from the 2030s, as well as newer 2060 flatbed Warbot/Cargo transporters retrofitted with pressurized cabins; underneath them, more convoys snake their way up the mountain to GAIA Prime and back to Zero Dawn, Elysium or USRC.

The Vert bucks as the engine pods start to turn, the vehicle slowing into semi-hover mode.

They are here.

* * *

[ZD_MF_DTP:2066.01. .75560.2355]

Bryce Orbital had, once upon a time, a massive collection of halls for the testing of its lifters and payloads, part of the entire Bryce Space Technologies/Faro Automated Solutions Aerospace pipeline for prototyping, testing, manufacturing and integrating the latest in aerospace tech at the new breakneck pace of the late 2050s and 2060s; massive cryo-cooled vacuum chambers and exposure chambers for testing satellites, spacecraft components and surface machinery under the conditions of space, deep space, Luna and Mars. The massive halls were padded out with thick layers of isolating aerogel, and an appropriate cryogenic bunkerage system installed and never removed.

Now that basic infrastructure is parted between two departments: Some of the old chambers are now part of HEPHAESTUS design and testing department, testing field transmission array designs and fabrication material strengths in projected atmospheres and the depth of space; others concern themselves with space itself, running terrestrial series of audits on a selection of satellites for use by Zero Dawn; now they mostly test fabbed materials and designs along the rest of the team, with the initial satellite wave already in their orbits. Until in 60 years, nothing more man-made launches into space.

The rest is dedicated to the joint cryonics section of DEMTER, ARTEMIS and ELEUTHIA alike, and it is time to pack up. The room betrays the work of the last 14 months at every angle; most of the cryonic preparation lines are now empty, finished with processing the seeds, zygotes, and individual cells for cryonic preservation under the supervision of scientific personal. The elaborate conveyer belt system once used to shift around the individual, self-contained "cryocells" and their contents are likewise mostly empty, belts inactive, laser scanners cold, handling robots moved to stand-by position.

The attention now rests on the vaults, carbon copies of the handling system installed in all three sub-facilities for the handling of their respective material; thick blocks connected to power leads and massive cryogenic nitrogen pipes, wrapped in solid meters of aerogel isolation, only accessible through a set of staged airlocks with conveyer belts that lead into the efficiently stacked interior, cryocell after cryocell slotted into place inside their carousels. Vault internal temperature: -75°C. Cryocell storage slots: -135°C. The cryocells themselves are chilled so far that every aspect of chemical activity within them has come to rest; without the complex mixture of biochemical complexes, nanobots and subtle necessary genetic tweaking, the cells would be impossible to revive. The cryocells are also wrapped in dense alloy and isolation gel for passive endurance. Optimum storage density with high redundancy and cryosafety, and now it is all getting emptied out at speed.

Robotic arms whirr and whine as they move along the rails, manipulators contorting as they fetch the cryocells and stow them in metal framework transport caskets, also fitting in pressure bottles of nitrogen. Electronic valves open with hisses, and the freshly loaded cryocells in their caskets are in turn transferred on more conveyor belts to big, padded transport crates where they are stacked and locked down with magnetic bolts. The finished crates are sealed and picked up by heavy fork'bots for delivery to the cargo flatbeds, standing inside the designated loading area.

A pressure door hisses open and allows yet more flatbeds in from the outside, slightly steaming with vapor from the omnipresent fog; with them comes the ever-present stink of foul eggs. Nobody likes it, and before now they had the time to purge the airlocks better, but with the last exodus of processed gene-stock to the facilities in full, time-critical swing, final sacrifices are made easy. Nobody will have to live with the stink for long anyway.

That does not mean there is no complaining. Of that there is plenty over the shouting and general cursing, and the trampling of a hundred feet and whirr of a thousand servitors.

For Charles Ronson, one more stress factor amongst too many.

Furiously he and his team still work on preparing more zygotes among the expansive catalogue for cryo-preservation; the harvesting initiatives have continued until the last possible moment, and beyond. Often, animals were bulk-shipped instead of bothering with the complex procedure of zygote-extraction surgery in-situation. It is a desperate bid, unsustainable in the long run in either case; often animals died soon after arrival, or had to be euthanized to create space for more specimen. Often, their corpses went straight to APOLLO, for a final scan and documentation. High-resolution MRI scans, frozen brain slices and scans… a few more datapoints for a future that will have to try to reintroduce these majestic animals into the reconstructed wild, re-establish food chains and habitats. Maybe enough to reintroduce a true wild population after a fashion, not just… a forever-maintained facsimile of what once was, and whose remnants, the sketch of the beautiful blueprints of evolution, now lies buried around the world, and is transported away in front of him.

Inside his soul, the anger sloshes about in a sea of emotion, tides of fear, despair, resolve, admiration and remembrance breaking on the walls of the mind. So much… lost. Lost forever. Earths biosphere may have suffered so badly during the '20s and '30s, not enough reclaimed or even found reclaimable during the '40s. The African Penguin… the Northern White Rhino… he African Wild Dog… the Zebra herds… the Ethiopian Wolf… the Mountain Gorilla… all swept away by catastrophes, reduced to genetic memories, holographic recordings, a few dozens to a hundreds maintained in human captivity, held by thin thread, or stored zygotes. A memory, waiting until the day new robots and new biotechnology would finally allow their revival and re-introduction.

Now, with Zero Dawn, they almost have all of that… a thin hope, for a better future. A better world to come.

But not for him. Not for Tom. Not for anyone else at Zero Dawn. Or humanity for that. All… burned away, by its own, arrogant hands. Turned into biofuel by the swarm, burned in their microcell arrays, blasting the carbon dioxide into the air. Poisoning the air even more as they burn the forests and choke the seas, erasing countless species across the pacific, China and south-east Asia before the Zero Dawn harvesting teams and their swarm of cataloging and catcher 'bots even had a chance to get to them.

All the more reason to pack what they have up safely for the long sleep into a safe new future to colonize.

But that motivation, the burning zeal, does not help alleviate the stress of making it all work on time.

His team is bleeding active members by the hour. The Smart Announcement System constantly activates, calling out new names for the evacuation list; others for the medical bay.

And then: "Charles, your meeting with Elizabeth is in five minutes."

"FUCK! Kamer, get over here, finish those zygotes. I have to go."

"Just a moment Sir; critical phase right now."

"Just- alright, alright, finish it." Ronson takes a deep breath, slowly working them in front of his face, forming them into fists for just a moment as he forces himself to breath slowly and steadily. "Sorry."

"It's alright Sir." But Kamer's manor says otherwise. _Dammit._ Ronson wants to curse, now about himself. He calls up the list on his focus.

So, so close. If they rush, if they get no complications… they can process everything on the critical list, and a lot on the secondary ones.

If Ronson was religiously inclined, he would send a prayer skyward right about now. They might, _might_ actually make it far enough down, secure enough of the specimen and lock them down inside the hastily expanded cryo-vaults before they are forced to seal down the facilities.

For one moment, again hope shines bright in his mind.

Then he looks on his tasking list, and stress washes it away like sand upon stone.

* * *

[ZD_MF_DTP:2066.01. .3445.2495]

The meeting room is located on the "Alpha deck", on the fourth floor of the primary R&D floor, which also housed the GAIA Coding and Testing Beta department; the floor is still a beehive of activity, programmers implementing software on their massive holographic screens; the neuro-networking group is still busy pruning down networks. On a table once reserved for coffee and snacks, an impromptu collection and storage station has sprung up, thick hardened storage chips slotted into hot-swap connectors and wired up to a dedicated server node, who in turn has sprouted cables all over the work area. The last patches for GAIA.

Sobeck will take the drives with her to GAIA Prime. The last dedicated work of her brilliant team of programmers, software developers, and AI scientists.

Another fifteen leave as she watches. Ikana Xu nods at her as she goes past her, no travel bag in hand. Sobeck knows exactly where she is going. The rows have been edging out of Medical already at times. She doesn't want to know how it is in the other end.

Are the… are the corpses of the euthanized, still warm from life that has just left them, better handled by the doctors or by the robots? She… she doesn't know. She can't _decide_. But she has to. She's the leader. Their _mother_.The Visionaire that gave them all a purpose, as several have said over the past weeks, as the swarm closed in, inevitably and accelerating closing the loop around the necks of humanity, of earth… of existence as they know… no _knew_ , itself.

And now… she doesn't really know what to say.

 _The facts, Elizabeth. The facts first and foremost, and only. They are not children to be cuddled; they are adults who can deal with that they face, and have to face._

Tate and Naoto are the first into the conference room besides her. The japanese man holds a physical dataslate in hand, an expanded model good for viewing entire papers on, and is swishing and typing around on it, still managing his team to maximum effectiveness even while away.

Tate on the other hand is casually sitting on the table, legs swinging above the ground, clearly chewing _something_ in his mouth. Stims, or old chewing gum, or whatever else he has access too. She's made no point of checking as of late. A few months ago, she still had the notion to check his registry from time to time, to contain Tate's worst excesses… then time started running out, the mountain of tasks did not grow shorter (or at least felt so, even as the true number of tasks remaining did actually drop, and quickly) and she stopped. Tate has actually mellowed, sort of, over the last months. Even someone whose personality profile starts with "paternal environment-induced authority protest behavior prevalent" seems to take the end of the world with some seriousness as soon as everything gets tightened up in new caskets and one day you have to report to Requisitions to receive a M2 Environmental Combat Suit. It's the same one the military uses now, some of the features stripped out. Using the same fabrication template is more efficient for mass use, and the M2 does its job of keeping someone alive in the new reality very, very well.

Brochard-Klein and Shĕn are the next in, both half-emerged in Focus calls, talking with the thin air. Brochard-Klein is on the horn with people at ELEUTHIA-9, it seems: "Load the final zygotes, imminently, and run a last hot-check on the wombs. I have replacement parts coming up, as well as our expanded store of Servitors and toys; load those up in storage. No reason to let them waste away at ZD. _Que_? I don't care, get it done!" Shĕn holds a heated discussion with someone in coding: "No, okay, just… yes I know you need more time, but you aren't getting it. Stabilize it as much as you can, amend the documentary. I will see into it."

Shĕn dropped into a chair with a bang and reached for a can of military-grade stim-drink, ripping open the seal and downing something like half of the contents in a few big gulps. The young woman looks burned out. Understandable. Elizabeth is never going to say it out loud, and in another manner the statement is false, but HEPHAESTUS is Zero Dawns second great achievement after GAIA. A specialized AI system, a software suite with a towering number of programs and neural networks, into which Shĕn and her team squeezed an ultimate conceptual understanding of physics, engineering, programming, even AI design. Logistics, robotic assembly, statics, construction… highly detailed simulations of entire robots, their onboard systems, and an… entity that can evaluate all of that. A conceptual interface with GAIA, second-to-none.

Hopefully the humanity to come will cherish the brilliant work of the men and women… and of GAIA.

The remaining Alphas filter in fast, all webbed in their own calls. Hasegawa is the only one without much to say. Her work is largely done. The quantum computers are installed, the cryptographic algorithms written, the broadcast tower design finalized, the expert systems written. The only thing MINERVA ever needed is time. Time that will only come after Zero Day.

Then they finish, and wait.

Elizabeth takes a deep, painful breath, looks around. All of them make eye contact, waiting.

Time to address the truth that already hangs in the room. No fanfare, no theatrics, no big speeches.

"We didn't have enough time. Zero Dawn is incomplete; as of now, we cannot guarantee a smooth launch. Too many possible bugs in the executables, too many interaction faults, and no chance to prune them out if we go to Elysium."

"So we're going to GAIA Prime, as well." Hasegawa speaks it out for everyone.

"Good you proposed the Lightkeeper protocol, huh Liz?", Tate remarks, spinning his chair. "Would be hard to finish coding GAIA inside a bunker that has zero accommodations for us squishy meatbags."

The lump in her throat is heavy, threatening to pull her to the floor, immobilizing her vocal cords.

"I know this isn't what I promised. We hoped to launch GAIA and Zero Dawn on schedule. Join our friends and loved ones in Elysium, but…"

"Elizabeth?" Ebadji says softly. "It is okay."

 _No it is not. It is not fair. It is fucking not okay._

"Zero Dawn is all we, all humanity has left. It would be selfish to abbandon it now. It would be a waste to abbandon it now."

"We all knew this would be our apex in life; our final, greatest work," Brochard-Klein agrees. "The writing on the wall was clear well before today."

"So… look, I know this pains you. You have a mother in Elysium. I have a sister there too."

" _Mes parents_ … I will miss them."

"Allright, guys, girls… thank you. Thank you."

She doesn't know what else to say. But the teers are coming.

"Allright. Back to work. Our Vert goes in 23 hours. See your teams to the end, then report to the landing pad. Get what you can. Final patches of the software will be transmitted via GAIANet and carried dual on crystal data carriers. Final collection time for that is half an hour before we launch."

They nod, and disperse.

Elizabeth hurries back to her office, cutting through the chaos. Even now, people give way for her, smoothly gliding out of the way, nodding in respect and goodbye. Her own steps broke into a run, a stumble through the door that hissed open in front of her; she slapped the privacy key as she went, allowing the glass to polarize, lock out the outside world. The soundproofing is good enough, and even if, she can't bring herself to care.

She falls into her chair, and sobs. First intermediate, swallowed back down the throat that produces them, then breaking into a full-on stream, long but somehow cathartic noises of inner pain.

She waits for GAIA to ask a question, like she always did when Elizabeth had a breakdown - Then realizes that there is nothing to be heard. GAIA is offline, her core matrix and code in transfer to GAIA Prime. Final instantiation will be handled by Okeido and his team, flying over together with GAIA, clamped down inside her carriage robot.

Through tear-smeared eyes, she searches for the clock and visual overlay. The Vert will take another 20-odd minutes to reach GAIA prime. Then… 30 minutes to mirror everything onto the servers. Finally, 5 minutes of boot time, followed by the slow system instantiation. GAIA is growing up one last time. The biggest server to date. All the processing power she will need. All of her subsystems. The subordinate functions will have to wait until the Alphas arrive.

So as long as GAIA makes the launch…

Oh god, the launch. Imperfect. Not quite there. The rest of their lives, locked away in a bunker far away, finishing their life's work, and then…

No chance of getting to Elysium. Not even in their wildest dreams. The time it would take humans to leave the airlock doors… would be enough for the swarm to lock on. To use its final energy reserves to try to crack open the bunkers, get its hand on anything with enough energy to substain even parts of it. The same for Elysium. The Biomass of 2000 humans, plus consumables for 100 years?

No, holographic coms is all they will ever have. For the rest of her lives.

And Sobecks chances of getting to Elysium to say goodbye are nill. Zero, to be precise. No last hug. None that would really matter.

She is going to break her mother's heart. Again.

And Elizabeth Sobeck cries again, her body shacking as the guilt of it all overcomes her.

Why keep going? Why, why, WHY? She's not some automaton, one of Teds servitors, a parrot following what humans have thought it. She feels. That is what makes her human. What makes GAIA human, in some way, inside the shell of Superintelligence. And the fate of humanity, her fate… it hurts. It feels so wrong. Ripping her heart out, squashing her lungs, making her tear ducts turn into sore foreign objects she wants to excise from herself just to stop that pain from going away.

She remembers an old saying. "We are the most alive when we suffer. The pain of not having the world as you like it."

As an AI scientists, she knows just how right that is. The world is chaotic. AIs are driven, like humans, by conflict, by a need for reconciliation of an internal worldview with the external world. Solving issues. Coming from the status que to the state the agent desires. God, it sounds so cold, and yet so natural.

But the logical, rational choice, is to finish Zero Dawn. It is the only choice. The only one that matters, and her personal feelings be damned. Those of her team be damned. Life needs a future. It deserves a fucking future, and she has not come this far to leave it squandered in the mud of Beta status.

Zero Dawn will launch. If anything, the billions dead, in pain and fear… they deserve it.

Humanity, earth deserves it.

And if all that is not worth it, then nothing is.

* * *

 **A/N:** Coming back to this world has been a surprisingly wonderful change of pace for myself, despite the sheer grim and apocalyptic atmosphere that defines the year before Zero Day. I hope you enjoyed this new update!

As the pacing develops, Welcome to Frozen Hell will likely have one, maybe two more updates before the current update style dries out (so to speak); I am also unsure if I even want to portray every single Alpha preparing their project before Dispensation. Or even can. Zero Dawn is exceedingly complex after all, and figuring out its internal workings for a moment-to-moment project is... hard.

This will however definitely not be my last writing project for Zero Dawn. I've rather taken a liking to the setting, and was already playing around with a second story, following GAIAs perspective primarily. We'll see how that develops.

Feedback and discussion is always welcome! In this case especially, do you think I manage to nail the characters, and what do you think about my writing style here?

And a sad fact - The animals Ronson names in his part are actually threatened with extinction, today. Given how bad things got in the Horizon timeline... well, I hope it never comes that far.


End file.
